It seems like one out of every four searches I make sends me to Wikipedia for one thing or another - for example, the metric prefix atto- means 10 to the negative eighteenth power, or one quintillionth, or really quite amazingly bloody small. Google itself defaults to a lot of Wikipedia pages for its Knowledge Graph info, and you'll get small cards full of Wikipedia content for many searches from Android Wear. But developer Dheera Venkatraman (whose previous Wear apps Wear Camera Remote and Matrix face we've already written about) has an even better solution.

Attopedia is a surprisingly effective Wear app for browsing full Wikipedia pages. Its novelty comes from the nested navigation (see above). You execute a voice search to get to a specific Wikipedia page, then swipe down to browse through the various sections, which are given photo backgrounds where available. Swipe left again to advance through sub-sections. This structure makes it easy to get to the information you want, even on a page with thousands of words, without pulling out your phone.

The app is a solid alternative to the rather truncated cards that Google's own Search actions bring up on Wear, and like Venkatraman's other Wear apps, it's free. Right now it loads pages a little slowly in my testing, probably because it's caching all the images on the page in the background. Here's hoping that can be addressed in a timely update.

Comments

Daniel Marcus

This is what Wear apps should be. By leveraging gestures and voice commands, it's actually useful on a watch face.

taz89

Imo smart watch need to stop trying to be a full fledge Android device on your wrist like a phone if they ever want to succeed, hell that's what we were critiquing the galaxy gear for trying to put a phone on a wrist. When people see hey look it's got browser, it's got flappy bird etc they probably don't take it seriously. What google showed in the original wear video and what developers are doing now with it is imo too different thing.

Kylecore

I'm just glad to see the amount of development that's happening in general. It doesn't matter what it is as long as its getting devs on board. After all, a product is only as good as the community that supports it.

taz89

Agree it's good to see atleast developers on board, just wish they would stop trying to make it a phone on a wrist and start creating apps that make a wearable a useful tool. Hey am sure along the line this will happen and maybe devs are just having fun to see what wear is capable. As with any platform there will be a ton of rubbish and some very awesome apps that will make wear a must have. I've just not seen anything from wear devs that makes me excited.

John A

This is the best comment I have read today and as you can probably tell, I wholeheartedly agree with it.

I'm constantly excited to see what developers come up with for Wear. Some apps I find useful, others, not so much. But I certainly wouldn't say a certain app shouldn't be on a smartwatch just because I mightn't find it useful.

I'm genuinely loving my G Watch experience and look forward to what is still to come...

wuxiekeji

That's what we said about phones 10 years ago. :)

Seriously though, this isn't a browser in the traditional sense. It leverages voice search, and also a 2-dimensional grid-based approach to quickly navigate a huge page that has sections and subsections (putting them on the vertical and horizontal axes, respectively). It's also a UI experiment to propose an idea of how a future "smartwatch internet" might look like, and designed to be much easier to use than a traditional, vertical-only mobile browser. We have to start trying somewhere. (This is also a GPLv3 project, so anyone is most welcomed to hack at it and help move this forward.)

Why is this useful? Sometimes you're in the middle of a conversation and you just want to quickly get to a particular fact while walking on the street, without having to pull out and peck at your phone, or get a quick synopsis about something mentioned in conversation... or perhaps you want to refer to a Wikipedia fact while you're in the middle of a phone call. I don't know, but those are my use cases.

FrankJL

NO! For the love of god you money hungry developers with absolutely no vision or goal. STOP treating the got damnn watch asa small device. We dont need stupid dictionaries, wikipedia, games, keyboards on a watch!! This whole treatment android wear is getting from devs is getting frustrating. Nothing have been released to really compliment the device.

Go ahead and say what you want. Defenders of all android. dev security guards. Truth of the matter is the same devs that are supposed to help the device are ruining it with stupid releases like this one.

Yeah, believe the no ads for now. In the soft dev world. No ads are only temporary.

Wesley Modderkolk

I'm unsure where you'd even want to add ads in this app?

FrankJL

easily ads could be built in as you swipe. Reading an article and you sipe to teh next an ad could appear as a placemat before the next article. I am pretty sure the dev have plans or thought about it. Nobody builds without thinking about making money in the future.

Just think if this apps gets a few million users or even 100k+ he can easily make some good money by adding simple ads in between.

Wesley Modderkolk

Yeah, and you immediately show the problem with ads on Android Wear. They'll take up the whole screen. I don't know what you think about developers and users, but they're not going to look at full-screen ads.

I really have no idea where your negative stance on developers is coming from.

Guest

He probably works in finance or some other money sucking industry and assumes everyone is as evil and money hungry as him.

MJ

Agreed... I need to search Wikkipedia? I am going to pull out my phone. I really only see smartwatches being useful for viewing notifications from my phone, sports scores, quick weather updates, and being able to customize the face for different looks.

Any camera on it, the ability to make calls, and most apps that will be made for them will be just fluff and only cool for like 15 seconds...